


The Boatswain's Hook

by DictionaryWrites, Johannes_Evans



Category: Peter Pan & Related Fandoms, Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: 20th Century, Anglo-Irish Relations, Asthma, Chronic Illness, Chronic Pain, Class Differences, Complicated Relationships, Dark Comedy, Depression, Disability, Friends to Lovers, Grumpy Old Men, Humor, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Neverland (Peter Pan), Power Dynamics, Retirement, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 08:48:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28348674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johannes_Evans/pseuds/Johannes_Evans
Summary: In bringing new Lost Boys back to Neverland, Peter Pan brings something else, too, and Spanish Flu wreaks a deathly effect on Hook's crew.In the aftermath, the Jolly Roger comes for the last time to England, and Hook faces the most frightening adventure of his life: retirement.
Relationships: James Hook & Peter Pan, James Hook/Smee
Comments: 16
Kudos: 29





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some general content warnings: Hook & Smee have killed people and don't have an issue with killing people, including killing children; there will be descriptions of graphic violence. The main warning I would stress for this story will be in its exploration of disability and chronic illness, specifically in living with (primarily unmedicated) asthma, and Hook is going to be dealing with asthma attacks, anxiety, insomnia, and all those other fun symptoms, which has been caused by a respiratory illness. 
> 
> This is set in the 1920s, so it's in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu pandemic, but it's still topical, of course. Other than that, there'll be referenced parental abuse, period-typical homophobia, especially internalised homophobia, and similar. 
> 
> Hook isn't actively suicidal but is primo depressed and references dying constantly.

# Prologue

It was a very warm, balmy morning in the tight grip of summer, and when James Hook heard the quiet shuffle of his boatswain’s feet on his office floor, he had already been awake for some hours.

He did not move from his place on the bed, stripped of his bedclothes and lying fitfully as he was on top of a great many piled and twisted blankets, even as he listened to the shutters click softly as Smee pulled them open, letting light into the room, no doubt.

“Captain?” called Smee.

Hook made no reply, lying on his back and staring up at the dark recesses of his bed canopy, hoping that Smee would go away.

To his left, the curtain twitched, and Hook winced at the flicker of bright sunlight it allowed through, although Smee quickly pulled the curtains ridiculously around his neck and blocked a good deal of the light, leaving only enough that Hook could see the glint of Smee’s gold-framed spectacles.

“You don’t look like you’ve slept,” said Smee.

“I slept,” Hook replied. “For an hour or two, at least.”

Smee looked dismayed. “Is that all?”

“It is hot, Smee.”

“It wouldn’t be, Captain, if you had these curtains open, and didn’t sleep under so many blankets.”

“As you say, Smee,” Hook said tonelessly.

Smee stood there a moment, still draped in Hook’s bed curtains. “Would you like to sleep a while more?”

“I certainly would,” said Hook.

“Right, Captain,” Smee said, and withdrew. As his shoes once more shuffled across the carpet in the direction of the cabin door, Hook lay still in the darkness and counted on his hand the seconds: one, two, three—

Smee’s shuffling steps came to a stop. A beat passed. Smee’s steps retreated, and once more, Smee’s face appeared between his bed curtains.

“Do you think you _will_ sleep more this morning, Captain?” Smee asked.

“No, Smee,” Hook said, and sat up.

“I hope it pleases you to play with a man so early of a morning,” Smee grumbled as he pulled the curtains open, but his tone was good natured, and Hook pulled himself to the edge of the bed, murmuring a thanks as Smee set a jug of hot water on the table beside him.

“A man must have some small pleasures in life, Smee,” said Hook, washing the cloth over the back of his neck and his bare chest. Smee paid no attention to his state of undress, and busied himself with rifling through Hook’s wardrobe, whistling under his breath.

Hook could hardly remember how this particular habit of Smee’s had formed – certainly, he had never _asked_ his boatswain to attend to him like his very own batman, and while he was vaguely of the recollection that Smee had begun these attentions after Hook’s amputation, even then, Hook hadn’t much needed them. He certainly didn’t need them now, and said as much, from time to time, but it didn’t even make Smee falter any longer, and he still appeared in Hook’s quarters every morning.

“What time is it?”

“A little past seven,” said Smee. “You been awake long?”

“Since it was still dark outside.”

“ _Captain_ ,” Smee scolded him. “You could’ve had something to put you down.”

“Arsenic, perhaps,” Hook mused. “Or a bullet.”

“Or a sleeping draught,” said Smee.

“Or that,” Hook allowed.

“The crew worries, when you don’t sleep.”

“No, they don’t.”

Smee evidently did not have a prepared response for this, because he busied himself with making Hook’s bed as Hook began to dress himself. Once he had his trousers on, Smee helped him on with the harness for his arm, although he tutted at Hook’s stump and accused him of not putting his ointment on it last night – which was true, though Hook denied it – and then set about dusting and airing things out.

The island air, as it so often was in the summer months, was sticky and oppressive, and although he put on his blouse and vest, he declined his coat. His blouse threatened to stick fast and wet to his arms although he had scarcely had time to sweat in it, and he wrinkled his nose, shaking his head as he picked up his hook and slotted it into place on his arm, twisting until he heard it click.

“You needn’t do it so hard,” Smee said.

“It’s steel, Smee, it won’t shatter.”

“You’ll bruise your arm.”

“Oh, hush,” Hook retorted, although this particular comment told him that Smee hadn’t slept well either, though he had made no mention of it – he was always fussier when he hadn’t slept well, and concerned himself with the irrational fear that Hook was due to drop dead at any moment.

He first brushed his hair holding the comb in his right hand, and then, using a comb Smee had fashioned some years ago with a cork base, he affixed it to his hook and brushed out the other side. His reflection in the mirror took him somewhat by surprise, because Smee had moved the mirror yesterday, and he was distantly aware he needed to shave, and that in the bright morning sunshine, dressed in only his shirt sleeves and with his hair half-combed, he did not look so imposing as he would like.

It was the sort of thing he might have balked at, when first he served upon an English vessel as naught more than a clerk for all his officer’s title, seeking soon to make of himself a ship’s accountant, but that was a long, long time past now, and such things were best forgotten.

There were grey bags under his eyes for lack of sleep, and there were more lines about his eyes and mouth, in recent years, although he had lived out more of a lifetime than he ought have been allotted, taking advantage as he had of Neverland’s strange magics.

“You’re deep in thought this morning, Captain,” said Smee, in the tone of one making an accusation.

“Perhaps you might try it a time, Smee,” was his reply.

“That’s not for the likes of me, sir,” said Smee. “I’ve important things to be getting on with.”

Hook barked out a low laugh, popping his comb off of his hook and setting it aside, and for a moment stood at the window, looking out over the glistening blue waters of the bay, at the bright green of the jungle on the shore.

“No sign of him back?” he asked.

“None yet,” Smee murmured. “I think perhaps he thought he’d killed you, and he didn’t want to come back.”

“No,” Hook murmured, giving a small shake of his head. When he closed his eyes, he could still see the gaping maw of that awful beast in front of him, still recall the resistance and sudden tear of its flesh under his hook as he forced the spike through its brains.

Smee had removed the dressing on the wounds on his chest and shoulder, where the crocodile’s teeth had dug into him, a few days ago, and while the bruises had faded, the actual cuts healed, he still had small imprints where it had bitten. He was lucky indeed to have struck it dead before it rolled him over.

“No?” Smee repeated.

“Pan will be back,” Hook said, and came away from the window, sitting to pull on his shoes. This, Smee assisted with, and Hook didn’t complain, not interested in bothering with the shoehorn this morning. “I know it in my bones.”

“Would you be unhappy, Captain?” asked Smee. “If he didn’t come back?”

“Such queer questions you ask at times, Smee.”

Smee, crouched upon the floor, sat back on his heels, and he looked up at Hook a moment, his eyebrows raised, before he shrugged his shoulders. Smee, of course, had no care for proper dress, and didn’t even wear a vest – he had on a very heavy belt about his round belly, but that was all, and he’d pulled out the ties of his blouse so that it fell open, showing the black and white thatch of curls that covered his chest.

Hook, feeling his fingers twitch, clenched his hand into a loose fist.

“You ask if I would mourn a creature who has been a thorn in my side since first I came to Neverland. I hate him, Smee, as I have never hated another.”

“Exactly,” said Smee.

“Exactly?” Hook heard himself repeat.

“Well, hating him as much as you do,” said Smee idly, getting slowly to his feet with a quiet “oof” and collecting Hook’s gun and rapier from their stand. “It takes up a lot of space, is all I’m saying – I expect the inside of your head would be made suddenly empty, without him. Like a ship without sails.”

Hook could make neither head nor tails of this, and what’s more, he didn’t want to.

“Perhaps we should break our fast, Smee,” said Hook.

“You eat first,” said Smee. “I’ve to tend to the—"

“Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“You’ve been up how long?”

“An hour or so.”

“Then we shall eat together, Smee.”

Smee gave Hook a small smile, and Hook could see the fatigue in his eyes too, now – he didn’t have the bags Hook had under his, because Smee had an incredibly round, cheerful face that retained cheeriness even in deepest sorrow, but Hook could see in the blankness of his gaze the weight from lack of sleep.

“Nightmares, Smee?” asked Hook softly.

“From time to time, Captain,” was the answer, which was as close to a yes as Hook ever got. “Times are I want to get off this godforsaken island.”

“Do you really?” Hook asked.

“No,” said Smee immediately. “Don’t want the alternative neither.”

“No,” agreed Hook. “Nor I.”

Things had changed, these past months.

There was a feeling in James Hook of being close to a precipice, but what the nature of that precipice was and, indeed, what awaited him after his fall, he has no idea whatsoever. It seemed to him that change was heavy on the air in Neverland as a whole, the very breeze pregnant with opportunity, and it set his teeth on edge.

Even with Pan gone, and seemingly, the most recent of his stolen boys, Hook was left irritable and quickly frustrated, his anxiety simmering underneath his skin.

“Do you ever miss it?” asked Smee as he and Hook stood aside, overseeing the operations as some of the crew set timber aside. Given that they no longer had the accursed crocodile to deal with, they wished to restore one of the old docks that they had been barely using since the creature had appeared, and Hook had given his blessing.

It was good for them to have something to occupy themselves with – long gone were the days when they would sail the Jolly Roger out from Neverland and into earthly waters, that they might take their plunder as they pleased. Times had changed: boats now did not move by wind and sail, and their hulls were made of steel instead of wood, such that canon fire would hardly serve them as once it did.

They still didn’t want to go back, Hook didn’t think – if they did, none of them had ever said it, either amongst themselves where Hook could hear, or to Smee, and whilst the men certainly feared Hook, they often went to Smee with their troubles, and voiced their desires.

To rest in Neverland, after all, meant an immortality of sorts, and it meant that they were permitted a peace without any government or authority coming to arrest them – they lingered in Neverland for the same reason the natives did: peace.

But peace could only serve a man so well: he needed something to occupy him, even in paradise. And this was paradise, Hook was certain of it – enough food to eat, to gather as they walked, and it had been a long time, now, since they’d skirmished with the natives, for they had come to a sort of understanding.

The men would build themselves a dock again, but they hardly had enough people to make a real village.

It was different, for him, as captain, but he knew that surely, the men must want for women, and the natives couldn’t be less interested - which Hook could hardly fault them for, given his crew’s desperate avoidance of cleanliness or class – and yet none of them had ever mentioned even going ashore...

But what woman would allow herself to be spirited away to some strange nether dimension, left amongst pirates?

“Do I miss what, Smee?” asked Hook.

“The world,” said Smee.

“No,” Hook said. “I never liked the people in it.”

“You like the crew,” said Smee. Hook gave him a sideways look, and Smee grinned, his gold teeth shining in amongst the others. “Sometimes.”

“You miss it, I take it,” said Hook.

“Sometimes,” said Smee, putting his hands in his pockets. Here was another sign that Smee was particularly tired today – he ordinarily jumped at the chance to do different carpentry, something new, but now he was hanging back, lingering with Hook. Such idleness would infuriate him, most days. “My da and uncle used to have a carpenter’s, grew up in that shop, became a sailor when they died, was only sixteen. Used to like shore leave, but I don’t think I missed it like the other lads did – that was before I joined Flint’s crew, of course, and even then, he was a hard master, but I didn’t mind it. I like my work.”

“You like everything,” Hook said, with more scorn than he felt, but it was true – Smee was a simple soul, simple as anything, was pleased by everything, and hadn’t the grey matter to hold onto scornful thoughts for any length of time. It cut Hook at times – at others, it filled him to the brim and over with helpless affection.

“I miss people,” Smee said. “Not drinking, not riding – that’s all well and good, sure, but I miss streets, sometimes. Saying hello to people as you walk by, having them say hello back.”

“By God, you are Irish,” muttered Hook.

“Prod.”

“Fenian.”

“Toff.”

Hook put his hand over his heart and gave Smee a faux-wounded expression, and Smee sniggered, crossing his arms over his chest and looking out over the men again.

Hook’s father would roll in his grave, seeing his only friend a classless Irishman with more dirt under his fingernails than flesh, but he was probably rolling long before that, on the day Hook stood before a rogue on the bloodied deck of the ship he’d been sailing on, and said he should rather aid a pirate’s coffers than be left to die a navyman.

“I miss sailing,” Hook said, after some silence had passed between them, watching Starkey argue with Hayden, the ship’s carpenter, about some aberration in his sketches. “I know we move abut the island, but it’s hardly the same. I wish the sense of purpose we used to feel, moving from one place to another, finding some quarry to lay upon. There were always new battles to be won, new enemies to defeat. Now we rest on our laurels in our very own tropical Eden, and I am without purpose.”

“You’ve purpose,” Smee argued. “Leading the men. They’d fall to pieces without you as arbiter, tear each other apart.”

“Arbiter is a very complicated word for you,” said Hook.

“You use it a lot,” was the dry response, and Hook inhaled as a new breeze came toward them, but it wasn’t the cooling relief he had hoped for – it was as sticky and hot as the air, and Hook glanced to the crystalline waters of the sea beside them. It had been years since he had swum in those waters without fear – could he swim again, now, and cool himself?

He certainly presided over arguments and petty squabbles when they arose, but he was more of a distant judge at times than a captain – he had been reclusive, of recent, scarce spoke to any of the crew but for Smee, but they preferred that, he expected, as he was less likely to lose his temper and shoot one of them.

Perhaps if he killed one of them, his mood would improve.

The familiar crow-like cry sailed over the water, and Hook heard the sigh leave his mouth before he could even think of it in detail, looking at the green flicker of light on the horizon. There were other bodies on the air, too – more stolen children, like Hamlin’s own.

“Perhaps you should go to bed,” said Smee, scowling in the direction of the flying shadows as they made their way to the other side of the island. “We can after them as you rest, Captain, kill them before they land.”

“Oh, leave them, Smee,” Hook muttered. “They’ll come to us for their deaths, soon enough – and you know Pan always kills them himself, if they last too long.”

It was three days later that one of the crew, a little man by the name of Mikey McGuinness, started to cough. They took him ashore to one of the little huts they’d built at their new dockside, but already, whatever flu he had was spreading through the crew.

They didn’t usually get sick, in Neverland.

# Chapter One

In his dreams, as in his waking life, it seemed that Pan was ever out of his reach.

Hook, his feet fleet and graceful beneath him, moved fast over the mast, faster than Pan could even with his child’s speed, but whenever Hook lunged for him with the iron claw that graced one wrist or the rapier he held in his hand, Pan would evaporate from sight. Perhaps, were he to see Pan drop from the mast and lie tauntingly upon the air, or to fly from his grasp, it would not seem so supernatural—

And yet Pan disappeared so swiftly, so completely, as fog under strong sun.

Hook was dizzy as he dodged the ropes on the tall mast or climbed his rigging; he stumbled on the deck, made clumsy with nausea and vertigo alike; when he fell upon the swabbed boards, slipping on a sponge no member of Hook’s crew would dare leave awry, Pan laughed over him, beside him.

Sitting in the passenger seat of a steam train, the likes of which Hook had not travelled upon since he was a child himself, Pan was sat across from him. Sprawled on the other bench, and acting with the casual air of another boy eating an apple, Hook watched, powerless, as his white pearlescent teeth dug into a heart too big for his child’s hands to gracefully hold, and black tar stained his chin instead of blood. Without looking – for he felt nothing but pain, which was quite natural – Hook knew that his own ribs were broken open, and that the heart the child devoured was his own.

He looked down anyway, and stared into the chasm-like depths of his open chest, felt himself fall into the dark.

Smee was calling him, somewhere far off.

How desperate he sounded.

How strange was this dream.

As a puppet with his strings cut, Hook fell limp upon the ground when he reached the bottom of this tenebrous well, and he felt his head loll. As Pan stood over him, dagger in hand, Hook could not breathe, could not twitch even a muscle to escape, nor even move his lips to cry out, to call for help or to curse the boy—

When the blade was driven into his chest, still gaping as it was, Hook felt a curious certainty – this being that strange certainty of dreams, where the most bizarre of truths seems quite intuitive to one, no matter their unlikelihood – that it was piercing a man other than himself.

He saw a vision of his body as from a spectator’s view, sprawled limp as a marionette on the ground, his curls pooled about his head, his jaw slack, his forget-me-not eyes quite wide. Turning his head away from the sight of his own limp corpse, he looked to Smee instead. As the boatswain clutched at his bleeding chest, he fell to his knees.

Pan was laughing.

Hook knew it though he could not hear him.

* * *

Smee drew back the curtains in the captain’s sickroom, but he left the blinds down.

In the wan morning light, Hook seemed dreadfully pale, tangled on his side beneath his sheets and blankets, and upon his skin there was a horrible, feverish sweat. The Hook Smee had known some months ago, standing tall with colour in his cheeks and a subtle smile upon his lips, seemed to have existed in another lifetime: this was Hook now, laid in sick clothes and always pallid, always drenched with some new fever.

In his sleep, the captain’s face twitched and shifted, his lip curling, his brow furrowing, as though he were in silent argument with the spectres that haunted his dreams. The nightmares were not so bad as they had been at the advent of this horrible pneumonia, at least, for no longer did he cry out or sob in the night.

“Captain,” Smee said gently, picking up the tray of tea he had set aside for Hook on the chest of drawers. “Captain, the morning’s broken now, you must wake.”

In all the time Smee had known him – and that was some hundred years, if one really counted them, although the crew of the Jolly Roger knew never to do so in the presence of their captain – James Hook had been a man of such astoundingly keen ear that he sometimes slept with small plugs in his ears, for elsewise, he couldn’t sleep a wink, and it used to drive Smee half-mad, that the captain needed such complete darkness to get himself to the land of nod, that the tiniest pinprick of light should make him stir.

At times now, it seemed as though a shout would not wake him.

Smee set the tray on the end table and touched the captain’s arm: he jolted awake, sitting up straight so that his curls fell all about his face, and launched an attack on Smee with his stump. Smee gently caught him by the base of his forearm – it hurt the captain somewhat to be squeezed even lightly nearer what remained of his wrist – and did not say anything, waiting for the captain’s wild eyes to becalm themselves, and see his face.

It seemed to him, when the captain looked at him, that he saw a clarity in his eyes that he had not witnessed in months, that they had lost the clouded, unfocused look that they had long held, but even an optimist as he was, Smee did not wish to give himself false hope.

“Good morning, Captain,” Smee said softly. “I’ve your breakfast here for you.”

“Smee,” said Hook – this was a promising sign of lucidity, for even on the days he recognised Smee, he did not always recollect his name – by way of morning greeting, and gently shook his head, that his ringlets should not fall over his face, “I had dreams most uncommon strange.”

“You’ve been having them of late, Captain,” Smee reminded him. Their conversation was interrupted by the captain’s cough, which he hid against his knees in absence of a handkerchief, which Smee soon provided him.

With it grasped against the heel of his hand, Hook touched his own chest, tracing the line of his sternum, his fingers touching over his ribs as though counting them. They were horribly visible, in places – never before had the captain been so thin, nor his skin so pallid as to show off his bones. In his eyes there was a pensive look, contemplative and self-searching.

“Have I?” he asked, his voice very soft. “I confess, Smee, I don’t remember. Have we the ship aground, or am I in our new dock instalment? I cannot feel the swell beneath us.”

Stifling the instinct he had to gasp, Smee gestured for Hook to sit up against his pillows as he stacked them up that the captain might do so, and Hook leaned back against them, even as he looked about the room, at the armoire and the chest of drawers, its unfamiliar furnishings. In his face, Smee saw writ confusion and lacking recognition, but this was not in itself a sign that he was entirely lucid – several times in the grasp of a bad fever as of recent, he had decried the foreign state of his surroundings, recognising that he was not in his own cabin, and yet not known Smee by sight.

“Smee,” Hook said. “Are you unwell?”

“Oh, I’m alright, Captain, certainly I am,” Smee said, taking up the tray and setting it in Hook’s lap. Hook had not peeled off his nightshirt, as he did some nights, but it stuck to his sweated flesh and was all but translucent in places, very open at the chest: when Smee put the back of his hand on his forehead to test his temperature, the captain looked at him askance, but did not draw away. “You’ve been ill, sir. How’s your throat?”

“Sore,” Hook said. His voice was very hoarse still, and he began to cough again, this time into his handkerchief. Smee put some more honey in the cup of tea waiting for him. “My chest feels very full, I…” He watched the captain breathe in, trying to fill his lungs, and watched the now-familiar uncertainty in his eyes as he struggled to do so, touching his chest.

He began to cough again, and Smee’s body panged at the savage sound of it, the harsh loudness, the crackle of all that awful poison in his lungs and his throat.

“Smell the tea, sir, there’s mint in it as well as honey,” Smee said plaintively. “It will soothe you some.”

“Not consumption?”

“No, sir, no,” Smee assured him quickly, but the captain still glanced down at his handkerchief for sight of blood, his lips parted. The beard was thick on his face now, and Smee wondered, so one with the world as he was today, if he might be able to entice him to shave, for he ordinarily hated to sport such hair as he did now. He was ever so calm, this morning, and seemed quite put-together – could it be that Smee was to have his captain back?

The hope swelled in him like high tide.

“You had some bad fever, sir, or influenza,” Smee said softly when the captain finally picked up his teacup and sipped from it, drinking it down. “But then it turned to pneumonia, and we were all quite afeared that you would die.”

“Me? Die?” Hook attempted a haughty laugh, but it became a fit of hard coughing. Smee reached out to steady the tray, for he coughed so violently it shuddered in his lap, and it had been hard enough to entice Captain Hook to eat in recent weeks without his dashing his eggs and fried potatoes over the sheets.

For weeks on weeks, the captain had been ill in Neverland.

For months, really, whilst getting no better, and yet he did not die, although he sloughed off his weight as though he were fleeing a hunter, and needed to move fast in the water. He could not eat or sleep for coughing, and any sustenance he managed to swallow down would soon be seen again.

Of the crew, some third of their number had gotten sick with it and gotten well again, but several of them, the captain included, had gotten ill, and simply… Not gotten better. And that was bad in itself, a horrible thing, but none of them would die, neither.

When it had come to a vote, there had been one course of action only – no matter that Captain Hook was a foul and cruel seadog (or, indeed, _because_ that was what he was), no member of the crew wished him dead, and nor indeed did any of them wish that he should lie prone as he was, sick but undying.

They had sailed swift as they could from Neverland, and made their way back to England’s shores for the first time in decades. So many decades, in fact, that none of them knew the way back.

It was worth it.

Smee would burn a thousand Neverlands to cinders, to have Hook alive and well.

When he had stepped out down from the deck as Starkey had taken the helm, and the _Roger_ had set sail, he had moved back into the captain’s quarters. He had seen Pan crouched upon the captain’s bed, his elbows upon his knees, peering down at Hook as, buried in some delirium, the captain had tossed and turned.

Smee had shouted, had clapped his hands as though deterring a bird, and although Pan had flown to the window, he had not laughed as he ordinarily would.

“What _is_ wrong with him?” Pan asked, tilting his head, peering at Smee with his glittering eyes wide, bafflement writ on his face. It was so hard to remember he was not the child he resembled, that he was older by decades than Hook or Smee themselves. “I thought I would kill him, but it seems to me he is half-dead already.”

“Off with you,” Smee had snapped, mad with the fear that Pan might have killed his foe, and done so easily. “It is no concern of yours.”

Perplexed, Pan had fallen from the window, and Smee had locked the shutters again with some prejudice, and when Hook had cried Smee’s name in his sleep, he had rushed to hold his hand, and Hook had not slapped him away but held him fast.

And now…

With a shaking hand, Hook picked up his fork, and Smee slowly sat upon the edge of the bed, watching him as he ate. Although he trembled, and was ever so pale, he ate with his posh boy’s grace and delicate manner, and Smee sat quietly.

“Where are we, then?” Hook asked. “On one of the old ships run aground upon the isle?”

“No, sir,” Smee said. “We’re in a village, sir, Bispham-with-Norbreck. The Black Pool stands to our south.”

Hook stared at him, and even in his shock, he did not part his lips to look at Smee agape, for he thought things to be very impolite. His lips remained pursed loosely together, and beneath the beard, which was getting to be somewhat a mess, although Smee attempted to keep it trimmed although he could not shave it, Smee knew that his lips were very handsome, and that his jaw was very handsome too. Almost every part of Hook was handsome. It was a fact he had used to his advantage since boyhood, for even the sternest of schoolmasters permitted a handsome child some misdemeanours.

“England?” Hook asked, and he did not look angry, but profoundly grieved. “Smee… I do not recall the way home, you know.”

“No,” Smee said quietly. “Nor me – and nor does the rest of the crew. But we put it to a vote, sir, being as you had been ill so very long, as to what we should do. First, we asked the Indian Chief to look at you, but she was certain you would soon die, for though she gave you medicines of their conjuring, they took no effect. She was regretful, too, ‘cause she thought we might well think she was lying or such forth, being as weren’t getting better.”

“She probably was,” Hook said, and Smee pinched his thigh through the sheets, making him let out a sharp hiss.

“You mustn’t be ungrateful, Captain,” Smee said. “She had no reason to be kind to you or to any of us, and she was anyways. She wanted to take you back to their village, but I said no, in case you got all them as sick as we were. It was one of his boys brought this back to Neverland, you know – they call it the Spanish Influenza, and it made in your lungs a pneumonia.”

“Anyway,” Hook corrected him. “Not anyways.” He coughed, afterward, but Smee never thought he’d be so pleased for a snip like that.

Smee felt he could weep for the relief. He’d almost forgotten what it was like to speak to the captain, with his fussy corrections and his nastiness. He had missed it desperately – he had ached the whole time, and felt quite hollow for the loss of a man who was laid beside him.

“And,” Smee said, once the coughing fit had finished, and Hook had fallen back on the pillows, rubbing at the side of his temple, “when she could not help you, we sailed here to England. Mikey, you remember he got sick, first, he and Liam Dodd died ‘fore we landed, but Grey Peter and Jorge and John Boggs, they’re all getting better, too. I don’t know that the doctors did here was any better than what medicine she knew, or if it was leaving Neverland, but you are better, sir, and it has been months – longer’n any of the others took.”

Hook was silent a long moment. “Months?” he repeated.

“I’ve not had so long a conversation with you in all that time, sir,” Smee said quietly. “Either you would be delirious, hallucinating and forgetting things in turns, or all but comatose.”

Wheezing slightly, out of breath simply having eaten his eggs, Hook searched the blank air before him, as though he might read some answer there. “I don’t remember,” he murmured, after some moments of this. “I am— Smee, forgive me, I am exhausted.”

“I’d forgive you of everything a priest wouldn’t, Captain,” Smee said.

Hook laughed softly. “Smee, you are as sentimental as you are Catholic.”

“I’m full Catholic, sir,” Smee said severely, not willing to be mistaken in this arena. “Though my cousin Eddie had a mixed marriage.”

Fatigued as he was, the captain gave him a half smile. Despite that curve at his mouth, however, there was a distracted look in his eyes, far away and marked in its concern. “Aren’t you called Ed, Smee?”

“Ed _mund_ , sir, not Ed _ward_.”

“Of course,” Hook said, chuckling. His eyes did not lose that worried look before they closed, and he fell back on the pillows—

Then the next coughing fit started, and Smee hid his wince as he took the tray away.

* * *

Hook could not shave himself.

His hand trembled so very badly that he dropped the razor twice into the bowl before he called for Smee – for whom he did not really need to call, for since he had begun to recover his wits, Smee had scarcely left his side except to fetch one thing or another.

It was comforting, not to be left alone.

Smee was comforting.

The boatswain’s hand – although Hook supposed he wasn’t a boatswain any longer, anymore than Hook was to be a captain – was steady as he slid the blade against Hook’s skin, shaving away the hair that grew in disgusting thatch across his cheeks. He hated the very sensation of it, and it was a relief indeed, to have the skin bared to the air again, as Smee sculpted the hair on his face to allow only for his moustaches.

“I half thought it’d be in ringlets by now,” Smee said idly.

“A horrifying thought, Smee, thank you.”

“Wasn’t horrifying as I saw it, Captain,” Smee said cheerfully. “It was sweet, in a humorous way – like a highland sheep.”

“I have never in all my years wished to resemble any livestock, Smee.”

“No, Captain?”

“ _No_.”

“Alright,” Smee murmured, but he was smiling. He had been smiling a great deal, these past days.

A few scant memories of the past few weeks had filtered back to him. He recalled clutching at Smee’s hand one evening after vivid dreams, sobbing as though he were a child; he recalled gentle hands in his hair as he bent over a pot; he recalled Smee speaking softly to him, reading from a book as Hook lay ill with fever.

Smee had seen him in a great many undignified positions in his lifetime: these past months had served to multiply those occasions beyond measure, and yet Smee, so full to the brim as he was with the philosophy of _Good Form_ without even knowing he exhibited such a thing, had made no mention of it.

Hook had been in a confused state for much of it, and his memories were hazy, confused – hallucination mingled with reality, and in some places, he was not confident he could separate one from the other.

He still felt, frankly, somewhat confused – he was at times slow, and he struggled to remember something from one moment to the next; at times, he lost his place in conversation, or struggled to follow what Smee was saying. It was as though a fog had descended upon his brain, but copious rest was helping.

“I thought we might go for a walk, you and I,” Smee suggested. “Being as you’re feeling so well, of late, I thought a short walk might do you good – only five minutes, Captain, to the end of the walkway and back. Would you?”

“I think I should manage such a journey, Mr Smee,” Hook said quietly, and reached for his blouse, pulling it onto his shoulders as Smee fetched his hook. The leather strap that held it was polished to a shine, and the metal of the claw gleamed in the light: Smee took good care of the thing as though it were his very own, and Hook was so very consumed with gratitude for the having of him that he was quite overwhelmed with it, and knew not what to say.

A _thank you_ hardly sufficed at this juncture.

And here they were, aground in England, away from Neverland – long had passed the days where piracy could form a man’s occupation, and although the doctor had said his condition was much improved, he had doubted that Hook’s lungs would ever return to that which they had been. Gone was his immortality – functional as it was – and his good health with it.

And yet remained Smee.

“The crew have sold much of the treasure we had on the _Jolly Roger_ , I suppose,” he said as Smee held his hook in his place, letting Hook strap it into place, a tight, snug fit that felt _comfortable_ , satisfying. A touch of a hand often ached, made the scarred skin thrum with discomfort – the leather strap of his hook did not.

“Oh no, Captain,” Smee said. “Mr Starkey said we mustn’t do such a thing, that you’ve always said it is a matter of good accountancy to keep as much wealth as one might, for emergencies’ sake.”

“I did not know Mr Starkey listened so keenly when I spoke,” Hook said, raising his arms so that Smee could tie his belt around his waist. “Coming to a strange land with no papers to speak of, no family, no connections… None of that, I suppose, amounts to an emergency?”

“Well,” Smee said, pulling the belt tight, and Hook gasped, then wheezed, tapping his hand. Smee let out a horrified sound, leaning back, and Hook loosened the belt by a few notches, until it felt comfortable, and barely served as a belt at all, but merely a band of leather fastened loosely around his waist. He leaned back against the door jamb to catch his breath, trying to fill his lungs to what limited capacity he might, and Smee waved mint leaves under his nose until Hook pushed him bodily away, though it did help, he thought.

“Well, Smee?”

“Well, sir?”

“Well, you said. You were going to tell me about Mr Starkey and the crew.”

“Oh!” Smee said, clapping his plump hands together, and Hook gripped very tightly at the stair’s bannister as he began to descend it, leaning one shoulder heavily against the wall. He had been downstairs twice in the past few weeks, and each time, it had exhausted him. Even now, he felt very fatigued, and his breathing was slightly more laboured, although he hoped very much that the fresh sea air would do him good. “Well, Mr Jukes was caught in the street by some fellow who suggested he join the circus, being as he has so many tattoos, and it gave him the idea that they should do tours of the _Jolly Roger_.”

Hook felt his lips twist into a tight frown. “Tours, Smee?”

“Well, we’re all but a dead breed now, sir, being pirates, I mean,” Smee said, “sailors all have these— these steam ships, and what-not. But the _Jolly Roger_ is an authentic pirate ship – three masts, full sails, and all that. People are paying a good amount to step on deck, sir, and more to look below. They’ve been sending a stipend up to us, sir, being as you were on your sickbed. They keep sending letters asking word, wanting that you’re back on your feet.”

This sat ill with James Hook.

Every man on his crew feared him – they had seen him kill and slaughter, had seen him rule with his iron claw, so much more effective than an iron fist, and they knew him to be cold, and commanding.

“They shall be disappointed, I suppose,” Hook said lowly. “That I yet live.”

“No, sir, I don’t believe so,” Smee said quietly, his brows furrowing. “Mr Noodler cried, when Mr Mason suggested, when landed we on the coast, that we should be better finding a priest than a doctor.”

“You got both, I suppose?”

“That’s neither here nor there, sir,” Smee said quickly, and Hook exhaled through his nose, taking Smee’s arm when he offered it. Smee’s arm was warm and solid under his grip, and although Hook wished he could resist the need to, he leaned somewhat on his boatswain’s strength. His legs were as yet somewhat weak, and he knew that he was trembling, although the spring air was warm.

“And what of you, Smee?”

“What of me?”

“You don’t wish to be part of this pirates’ circus?”

“Oh, no, sir,” Smee said stoutly. “I shan’t be going anywhere you ain’t.”

Smee pronounced the fact with the certainty that was typical of him, and Hook did not allow himself to smile, but it pleased him so well that it was a struggle to retain a sense of neutrality in his expression. He inhaled as deeply as he could, and once the ensuing fit of coughing had passed, they walked down the path of the house.

They were on the Fylde, and Hook glanced back at the house. He had seen very little of it, had primarily seen the inside of his own bedroom and glimpsed the dining room downstairs, but it was a modest country house, with three bedrooms, not including the servants’ dormitory. In all truth, it was rather over-large for himself and Smee, but Smee had made some noise when Hook had pointed this out, saying that he wished to have space that others of the crew could visit them, and that the rent was very modest.

They were near enough to the coast, and looking out over the plains, Hook could see the horizon and the choppy break upon the waters, even as he leaned very heavily on Smee’s arm. The fresh sea air was a balm for the soul, but did little to help his lungs, and after they had walked scarce more than thirty feet down the path, Hook pressed on Smee’s shoulder with the curve of his hook, bidding that they should stop.

“It’s alright, Captain,” Smee said, although it was not alright at all, and Hook could hear the whistled sound to his own inhalations, his head bowed slightly forward. “The doctor said that it will be like this time for some time longer.”

Hook felt so tired his flesh felt heavy upon his bones, his cheeks throbbing, and when he leaned further into Smee, he put a steadying hand on Hook’s other side, helping keep him upright more than Hook might like to admit.

“Shall I carry you back to the house, sir?”

“Smee, if you even think of carrying me,” Hook said between wheezed breaths, “I shall gut you here and now.”

“I wouldn’t do that, sir,” Smee said seriously. “Even if you kept upright without me stood here beside you, you’d be liable to slip in the mess.”

Smee was so earnest in imparting this advice that Hook laughed, which only made him cough, and this made him wheeze all the harder. “Don’t make me _laugh_ , Smee,” he choked out, and Smee responded only by pulling a handful of heavily abused mint leaves out of a pocket, holding them to Hook’s face. The smell was as much, Hook could only suspect, some manner of placebo as it was a real cure, but he did fancy that the strong fragrance cleared his nose and throat some tiny bit, and he focused on his breaths as they stood thus on the road, trying to fill his lungs to their fullest.

It was like attempting full sails with one’s rigging tangled.

“If I could give you one of my lungs, Captain, I would,” Smee said quietly.

“As charming,” Hook said, and took a few moments to breathe, before he went on, “as that… mawkish offer… _is_ , Smee… Hell’s bells.” This episode of coughing went on for some time, and he struggled to take in breaths between hard, chest-racking coughs. His vision dimmed at its edges and he grasped tightly at Smee with his hand to keep from fainting ‘til it passed.

They stood like that, Smee stalwart under his weight, until he finally managed to say, only slightly breathless between words, “As charming as that… mawkish offer is, Smee, it is ultimately… ultimately useless.”

“I mean it, though,” Smee murmured to Hook’s chest.

Hook, embarrassed, knew not what to say to that, and so he said, “Let us back. I need to sit.”

It took a long time.

For such a short distance, on his unsteady feet, it took what seemed like hours to walk between the path and the house, and once they were inside, Hook tipped readily onto the plush couch beside the fire, shivering, grateful for the heat, and Smee fetched him blankets from upstairs.

He slept for a time, and woke himself up for coughing.


	2. Chapter 2

Hook rested underneath the blanket that Smee had tossed over him for some time, laid on his side. There was a painful exhaustion settled through everyone of his muscles, sinking deep into his very bones, and his chest ached distantly with every breath he took. He tried to keep his breaths shallow, so that his chest would not pang so much with the pain, but that only left him feeling somewhat light-headed and even foggier than usual.

It was a truly unpleasant balance, and he was grateful indeed that he scarcely had to move. The fire crackled beside him, heat billowing out into the room, and although he had slept for some few hours, he felt as though he had barely slept at all. His fatigue was an uncomfortable, sticky weight over his eyes, making him yawn almost compulsively, but when he tried to close his eyes and slip once more into Elysium, it eluded him deftly.

He considered rising from his place and seeking out a book or the newspaper to read, but his eyes felt tired and despite his boredom the very idea of focusing his eyes upon swimming black text made him inwardly blanch.

But failing all other entertainments, as ever, there was Smee.

It had for many years on the Jolly Roger been Hook’s habit to seek out Smee, wherever he might be found, and avail of his presence.

In times of boredom and inactivity, he and Smee would bite back and forth at one another, bickering and arguing with one another. Hook would tell anecdotes that Smee would generally pay attention to, but not irregularly lose the thread of; Smee would tell anecdotes so filthy and bawdy and frankly unrealistic that Hook would consider them for weeks. As Smee went on with his work, collecting the rigging, assisting with carpentry, overseeing maintenance tasks, or even sitting at the ship’s sewing machine, Hook would linger beside him, reading a book, or speaking back and forth with him.

In times of high stress, Hook would do much the same, but would not entertain himself: he would, lost in his thoughts, pace back and forth, allow himself to sink into his reverie with Smee’s calm, easy rhythm a soothing balm. Smee always worked in a well-contented way, untroubled by anything in the world, that Hook envied, and now was no exception.

As Hook laid on the sofa beneath his blanket, feeling like the invalid he now was, he watched Smee through half-lidded eyes as Smee went about other work.

Hook watched Smee through the doorway to kitchen, watching his back and the movement of his shoulders as he washed their dishes and then laid them to dry on the rack, saw him move back and forth as he set the plates away.

Smee kept a neat, orderly space, which one might be somewhat surprised at, to look at him – although Smee kept his clothes neatly folded and did not toss his shirts about as some men of their crew did, he could iron them every day and still find them creased as soon as he drew them about himself. Smee creased a shirt merely by looking at it: he was a genial fellow, but not tidy, and his hair and beard were often uncombed, his hat at a jaunty angle, his clothes creased and his trousers almost always drawn up higher on one side of his waist than the other.

These were visuals that could evoke even in the most cold-hearted of men an impossible affection, and did.

For all this messiness about his person, Smee kept his workspace in good order, his tools always neatly set away and carefully maintained, and while exposure to Hook had not rendered in Smee so keen an anxiety as to perfection, he certainly had picked up certain of Hook’s habits, such as sorting things in order of their colour palette, and always picking up blankets and throws to lay them down flat when they became creased or ruched in the course of the day.

Smee did this very thing on the chair, picking up the blanket slung over its back and refolding it before setting it down again, and when he looked down at Hook, Hook met his gaze, albeit sleepily.

“Heard you coughing,” he said. “Heard you stop. Don’t you want for your bed, Captain?”

“I wouldn’t be able to sleep, Smee,” said Hook in a low voice, and Smee bit at his lower lip, worrying it cartoonishly as he looked about. “You needn’t linger at my bedside and hold my hand, Smee.”

“I’ve done my work in the yard as you were sleeping, Captain, and there ain’t no call to be cooking just yet, unless you find yourself hungry.”

“No.”

“I’d only be sat, then, all idle.”

“Smee, you needn’t make up menial tasks only to bustle for my entertainment,” Hook said dryly – too dryly, in fact, because it made him cough, and he sat up on one elbow, coughing into his elbow. “Help me off with this, would you, Smee?”

Smee had not removed his hook as he slept, but had took a wine cork and put it on the tip to keep him from cutting himself or tearing at his blanket, but what bothered him was his harness, the leather pressing into his flesh as he laid on the sofa. As Hook unbuttoned his blouse, Smee released his hook from the holster at his wrist, and then reached into his shirt to unbuckle the harness against his shoulder. Smee’s fingers were warm against Hook’s skin.

“Thank you,” Hook murmured as Smee unbuttoned the fastenings at his sleeves and gently pulled the leather harness out from the sleeve, although he did it very smoothly, not pinching the skin whatsoever as he moved.

“I thought I might read to you, Captain,” said Smee. “If you don’t mind.”

“Why would I mind, Smee?”

“Well, you’d complain of the sun shining at times,” said Smee, and Hook harrumphed, not willing to laugh lest it crumple into coughing again. He pulled his blouse up to his chest again, and sank back onto the cushions, the blanket over his shoulder.

Smee didn’t read extremely well – he knew his letters, had learned them as a young man, but he had never read literature, history, or science before he began his service on the Jolly Roger, and even now, he had a great affection for ghost stories and mysteries, and often despaired that Hook could read some mathematics journal so contentedly, being as the subject matter was so dry.

Smee read stuntedly, often stumbling over words and sentences as he read, or starting over a paragraph entirely to perform a different, equally ridiculous accent to voice a character he hadn’t realised was speaking, and he mispronounced words with regularity – when he found a phrase in Latin or French or some other language, he would not even hazard a guess, and would shove the page toward Hook to read it for him instead.

It was the sort of thing Hook ought have found infuriating – invariably, it was endearing, as Smee pursued his reading with the cheerful enthusiasm he pursued everything.

Now, he said, “What about Mr Doyle, Captain?”

“What about him, Smee?”

“I’ve _The Strand’s_ latest issue, Captain, there waiting on the table,” said Smee with enthusiasm. “Tis from Mr Holmes’ latest adventures.”

“I would remind you, Smee, as I so often do, that Holmes and Watson are not real people.”

“That don’t matter,” was the stout retort. “It’s the _feelings_ , ain’t it?”

“I might complain, Smee,” said Hook exhaustedly, his face sinking back into the pillow, “but I would never stop you reading to me. There is not a schoolboy on this earth who reads with such amateur theatrics as you do.”

This was evidently too indulgent a compliment, because Smee put one hand over his chest and beamed at Hook, looking flattered beyond measure. “You really think so, Captain?” he said.

“Get your magazine, Smee,” growled Hook, and Smee laughed to himself as he walked away to take it from the table.

* * *

The rent on the house had been so agreeable in large part because it hadn’t been rented to anybody for a good few years, and had been before Smee had arrived in a state of some disrepair.

The roof had needed retiling, a few beams – though not load-bearing ones – in the attic requiring removal and replacement, and about the house had been a handful of problem spots where the wall needed to be spackled or the bricks set back into their places.

In exchange for a most reasonable rent, Smee had advised their landlady, an elderly woman by the name of Cratchett who lived in a bungalow on the other side of the village, not only would he repair what damage had been done to the house already by its lacking tenants and the wear of the elements, but he would keep it in good repair once it had been set to rights.

She had even agreed, most happily, that he should build on the land adjoining the old house a good barn from which he might pursue his carpentry again, although this had come with the included requirement that he might do some carpentry for her and her elderly husband, from time to time.

Her husband, she had said, had been bedridden for some years, and therefore she understood that Smee wanted a good place to settle himself and his captain, and that it was good indeed of him, that he should want to care for the man with the two of them now retiring from sea.

That had been some weeks ago – as Hook had laid in his sickbed on the Roger, Smee, Noodler, Mason, and Hayden had gotten the house together again in short order, and even hoed out the garden a bit, that it should be neater and tidier.

Mrs Cratchett had grown up in the house, so she’d said to Smee – it was a big enough place, with three bedrooms upstairs and an attic nursery, all made up with a playroom for the children, and downstairs, along with the big kitchen and dining room, there was a servants’ quarters, and half a wine cellar.

Smee had been very impressed that as well as a great bath, the house had a flushing toilet with a chain, but when he had expressed admiration for this, Mrs Cratchett had given him a very queer look, and he had kept his further enthusiasm to himself.

Of the rooms upstairs, Smee had installed Captain Hook in the master bedroom, in a four-poster bed the like that Captain Hook had always been drawn to, for he was very sensitive to light and sound and fared better with a curtain than without. It was a pleasant room that held the heat very well and had its own fireplace. It was big enough to host not only the wardrobe and a good chest of drawers, and a writing desk too, but also an armchair which Smee had set beside the fire when first he and the boys had been furnishing the room, and had then dragged up close to Hook’s bed, that he might be closer to the captain as he slept, and not irregularly, he fell asleep in this chair, for it was tremendously plush, and smelled of Hook’s cologne because Smee had spilled the bottle on it.

Hook couldn’t wear it, anymore. He had tried, had daubed a little of it on his wrists and the sides of his jaw, but it had made his lungs act up something awful, and he had coughed for an hour before he had begun to wheeze.

Smee had taken for himself the smallest of the other bedrooms, which had a door that adjoined Hook’s, and as well as having the benefit of being so close to Hook’s own, also took a lot of the heat that came from his fireplace, so that the bedroom was warm even when Smee did sleep in his own bed.

The sun shone right inside when it rose up in the morning, and Smee liked it very much, to be greeted with the morning sun, but it wasn’t nothing like the sun in Neverland – here, in England, the sun was wan and cold and shone like it was behind a film of something, as a candle behind lantern paper.

He almost hadn’t expected Hook to ever get better.

He half-thought he’d be in that waking coma, coughing and spluttering and beset with those horrible nightmares, for months more, for years, and when he’d finally woken, he’d almost not believed it. He’d made up the house trying to tell himself that if he made the house up nice, if he made it lovely, then maybe Hook wouldn’t die in it—

And then Hook had woken up, and it had seemed like more than he ever could have hoped for.

Hook spent most days, in the coming weeks, resting in bed.

This was not out of indolence – most days he would stand up from bed and go to the tiny upstairs bathroom, which was little more than a cupboard with a johnny and yet was fierce cold for all that, wash his face in the sink, and even that would leave him exhausted and light-headed.

He wanted to dress himself, but his hand shook very badly, and twice he got his blouse on and then fell onto the mattress exhausted – and if he were only tired, that would be bad but not so terrible, but he would wheeze so loudly too, and Smee winced to hear him breathe at times, there was such painful labour in it.

Smee ordered books for Hook, the sort of things he liked – he got a few newspapers and magazines, serious broadsheets that talked very seriously and saw no humour in the world, and extremely heavy works of literature with words printed very fine and small, and books of mathematics and the like, which were so dry Smee thought they should spit out dust when Hook cracked their pages.

The crew sent things along from town, too – they’d send up parcels with funny postcards and letters in bad handwriting hoping that Captain Hook was recovering well and that the sea air was doing him good and saying they’d been having a lot of business and that they hoped he should visit them soon or send word that they should visit him, and they’d send books, too, which were admittedly more for Smee’s liking – they’d be funny things, illustrated and bawdy and silly.

Hook wouldn’t think so – or, he wouldn’t say so, but he would smile in that half visible, sly way he did sometimes, when he thought something was funny but he oughtn’t to encourage it, or when he thought it was funny but not for the likes of proper men such as he.

He was bored, Smee thought.

As more time passed, as the captain ate proper food every day and did what exercise he could, he did recover somewhat – he was able to walk more around his room, and didn’t need to sleep quite so much in the day.

In the beginning, in the first few weeks since coming to himself from the pneumonia, he still slept for good portions of the way – it was almost worse for him, Smee thought, when he was well enough to be awake, but not well enough to go down to go wherever Smee was, working in the attic or the yard. Smee did his best to keep with Hook as much he could, to linger in his bedroom and sit with his own books or write letters to the crew, but even then, Hook didn’t speak much, didn’t make conversation, but would be lost in his own reverie.

It wasn’t unusual for the captain, but it felt different, in these times.

“You’re a most stalwart companion, Smee,” said Hook when Smee slowly came to himself, blinking slowly awake in the armchair beside Hook’s bed. He had fallen asleep after a heavy lunch, although he hadn’t meant to, and now that he was coming to himself, he saw that Hook was dressed and on his feet, and brushing out his hair.

It made Smee’s heart give a little flutter, to the see the captain brush his hair like that. But for the fact that he could hear Hook’s breathing, creaking quietly on the intake as it dragged on an edge in his throat, and that he could not feel the familiar flow of Neverland’s crystal waters beneath them, they were almost back to normal.

“Shall we go somewhere, Smee?” asked Hook softly, in a tone that rather forced its way into the casual.

“Oh, yes, Captain,” Smee said, sitting up, although he looked at Hook cautiously as he did so. He liked to encourage him, certainly, to move where he could, but Hook was so often not cognizant of his limits, and as much as Smee was happy to peel him off the carpet or the furniture when his fatigue got the better of him and he fell down, he didn’t like how embarrassed Hook got afterward. “Where to?”

“The end of the path,” Hook said. “I don’t actually want to walk anywhere, Smee – if you would put out a chair for me, I would merely sit outside a while. I miss the sun.”

“It’s not the same, you know,” said Smee as he knelt to help Hook on with his shoes, and Hook released a low, harrumphed noise that only wheezed somewhat. “As Neverland, I mean.”

“You don’t say,” Hook said darkly, and Smee looked up at the bright shine of his forget-me-not eyes, at the slight quirk of his lips beneath the hair of his moustaches.

Hook leaned very heavily on the bannister as they descended the stair – in two months, he had descended them only a handful of times, and not actually passed out of doors since their first small jaunt to the end of the path and back – and although Smee did not like how unsteady he was on his feet, he did not look so painfully thin as he had some weeks before. He was thin, but no longer gaunt, and although he remained pale, his skin had lost the chalky note it had carried for some long while.

Hook sat down in a deck chair, leaning back and closing his eyes. It was a warm day, but Hook did not complain when Smee set a blanket over his knees, and Smee fancied that while the slight wheeze to Hook’s breathing did not entirely fade away, it did quieten somewhat the longer he lay in the shine of the sun, his eyes closed.

Not having two hands to fold over his belly, he loosely gripped his hook with his fingers and rested it on his stomach instead, and looked quite contented.

The captain dozed like a housecat, and Smee felt himself happy in that moment beyond measure.

“Hullo, Mr Smee!” said the bright voice of Harriet Nott, who was the daughter of the innkeeper in the village. She had a caught rabbit hanging from her grip by its ears, and although she didn’t step through the gate, she leaned right against it with her chin on its frame, and stared at Hook, who glanced to her with surprise.

“Hullo, Miss Nott,” said Smee. “This is Miss Nott, Captain – she’s the daughter of Dick and Mary Nott, in the Egg and Swan.”

“The public house,” said Hook slowly, and nodded his head.

“Mr Smee says you were a ship captain,” said Harriet Nott excitedly. “Mr Smee says you’re the only man Captain Flint ever feared, he being the only man Blackbeard ever feared.”

Hook glared at Smee.

“What?” asked Smee. “S’true, ain’t it?”

“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Nott,” Hook said, and then added pointedly, “I’m sure we might have an illuminating conversation at some later juncture.”

Smee looked to Harriet, who visibly had little idea what this was supposed to mean, and was looking askance at Smee.

“He means go away,” said Smee. “But polite.”

“Oh,” said Harriet Nott, and nodded her head in that affable way children did, when you told them to go away and they had no real reason to linger. “My mam says to ask if you’d like a leg of lamb, ‘cause our uncle’s butchered one of his being as it fell over, and it’s an awful lot of lamb to eat at once.”

“Oh, we’d eat that, yes, wouldn’t we, Captain?” said Smee.

Hook, who had closed his eyes, said nothing.

“The Captain has very good manners,” said Smee pointedly. “Says it’s good form.”

Hook’s eyes opened, and he gave Smee an incredibly foul, very frosty look that made Smee almost feel as though winter had come many months early, before he pushed himself up in his chair, and turned to regard young Harriet Nott.

“It is very kind indeed of your mother to extend such a gracious offer to us, Miss Nott,” Hook said, and Smee could sound that he was a little out of breath, and wondered if this was why he had tried to avoid speaking, and then felt a bit guilty. “We should be glad indeed to accept – thank you for going to the effort of coming out our way to ask us, and please do extend our thanks to your mother for thinking of us. If there is anything at all we might offer in return, please, do let us know.”

“Mr Smee says you’re a racketer of some repute,” said Harriet Nott. “You could tell a story in the pub.”

Smee watched Hook’s lips move as he silently repeated the word “racketer”, uncomprehending, and then say, slowly, “ _Raconteur_ , young lady. And… And yes, maybe. Perhaps.”

Bracing his hook against his belly, Hook closed his eyes a moment and inhaled, although the breath caught in his throat, and it took him a few tries to inhale it in one go. Smee and Harriet both waited a few moments for him to go back to it, but Hook had a furrow between his brows, his head leaned forward as he tried to catch his breath back, and Smee knew he’d be coughing again soon enough.

“Best be off, Harry,” Smee said in a whisper. “Thanks.”

She nodded her head, giving Smee a grin that was missing a few teeth, and waved enthusiastically at the both of them before she took off at a run down the path, toward the village proper.

“Tea, Captain?” asked Smee. What he meant by this, of course, was, _Do you want some privacy for a minute, and I’ll leave you to it while I putter in the kitchen_?

Hook, after wheezing a few more times, gave a nod, and said, “Thank you, Smee,” in a breathless whisper, “good form.”

When he came back outdoors, Hook had brought his lungs more under control again, and after drinking some of the tea, he sat back in his chair and fell asleep to the sound of Smee pulling up weeds and cutting back unruly hedges.

It wasn’t for long, of course – the captain woke up coughing within an hour.

But it was a nice sort of peace, for a while.


	3. Chapter 3

The captain’s recovery – although Smee was hard pressed to call it this, as whenever he did, Hook would interrupt to say in dry and haughty tones, “Ιf a recovery it might be called, Smee.” – took many months.

The town doctor, a somewhat literal-minded but gentle man by the name of Bell, had quietly advised the captain that it was unlikely his lungs would ever return to anything like what they were, that the scarring on his lungs was too great to heal away with time, that he should accustom himself to this new way of being. He would recover somewhat, said Doctor Bell, but it would not rewrite what the Spanish Flu and resulting pneumonia had wrought in him.

Hook had been somewhat more melancholy than usual ever since, and now was no exception: the captain was sitting listlessly upon an armchair beside the fire, staring into the middle distance. The flames lit up the blue colour of his eyes, making it seem almost close to purple, and the eyes themselves seemed animated, reflecting the spark and flicker of the flames.

“Would you like to add a bit to this letter, Captain?” Smee asked, but he kept his voice soft, and Hook did not break from his reverie, his gaze remaining fixed somewhere Smee could not see.

Mr Starkey had penned the most recent letter to them – he told Smee and Hook almost everything about his life in the way that some men wrote to their mothers, and something about it made Smee feel quite strange. It was not an unpleasant domesticity – it was merely that for quite a long time, there had been a sense of companionship, of shared camaraderie, between himself and the crew, although they knew Smee to firmly be of Hook’s camp before he was of anyone else’s, and now, there was a strange distance between them, caused by more than the journey between Bispham and the Black Pool alone.

Mr Starkey advised that they had had a great many interested parties, that their tour was doing well, and that it had even been suggested that they might sail their ship along the coast and make scheduled port here and there, if the area ceased to be quite so lucrative.

The men were excited about that – of course they were.

Quite a few of them had gotten other jobs around the town, and one or two of them had joined up in the navy to serve again, and Mr Starkey advised they all found these new ships to be quite queer, but that a fact of any navy vessel was that it was in desperate desire of a capable and able-bodied seaman who knew his way about the thing.

He asked after Hook, of course.

Smee never knew what to say. He told them that the captain had been recovering, but it felt like an invasion of Hook’s privacy, to write the nature of his ailment in its precise detail upon the page, to describe his coughing fits, his fatigue, and his melancholy—

Smee could never describe Hook’s melancholy to anyone.

It had always been with him, something he wore every day with the regularity most men wore their breeches, and yet never had Smee seen Hook sink to such unplundered depths within its grasps, never heard Hook _quite_ so miserable, and quite so… Oh, Smee knew not what even to call it, only that it ailed him, and made his heart ache.

They had been on the Fylde some six months to the day, and the captain was well enough now to rise and dress himself almost every day. Now and then they took a short walk in the garden, or up and down the path, but he rarely left the confines of the house, and here busied himself with reading books, or sitting at the piano Mrs Cratchett had left in the house.

Smee had gotten some varied mathematics periodicals, which Hook routinely settled himself down with, scowling down at the finely printed words and scratching out notes for himself on another piece of paper – Hook responded to the field of mathematics with the same soft, affectionate smile and contented recognition as most men might respond to a field of daffodils, and while Smee thought it very strange, he liked anything that brought Hook a bit of joy, and more than that, brought him peace.

He did miss that certain, concentrated look Hook got in his eyes upon a scheme, and what’s more, he felt that Hook missed it too.

The closest he had gotten was when Hook gave him particular instructions to hand onto the vendor in town, and once the tools he had requested were purchased, had employed Smee’s assistance in tuning the piano.

Even having seen him do the work on the harpsichord upon the Jolly Roger, it still took Smee aback to see the captain work so concentratedly, with such intent focus, such skill and such dexterity with his hand and one of his blunted hooks.

The dust had made him very ill, and although the piano had never sounded so fine, Hook had coughed very badly for a week after.

Smee signed off his letter to Starkey, once more keenly aware that only his ugly signature graced the page and not Hook’s graceful, looping own, and stood to his feet.

“I shall to the post office with this, Captain,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to walk with me into town?”

Hook glanced up from his misery, staring into the fire, and then, to Smee’s delight and surprise, inclined his head.

“Very well, Smee,” Hook rumbled, still visibly lost in thought, but it was more than Smee was worth to point this out – he felt he had won a point and was not willing to say a thing that might determine the captain from accompanying him.

He helped him on with his coat, and although they did not walk arm-in-arm, he made sure their gait was the same, keeping them in line with one another, that the captain should be able to easily lean on him if he lost his way a bit.

Hook was some ways taller than Smee, being a gentleman only a couple of inches below six feet. He’d been strapping, once, although he wasn’t anymore, not filling out his clothes as he did. Now, he was thinner and more delicate of frame, and Smee thought, with a distant pang in his chest, that he would likely never climb a mast again, or wrestle another man to the ground, or hold his breath to swim silent as death some distance beneath the water, or, or, or.

What mattered, in the moment, was that Hook was taller than Smee, and that Smee’s head was in line with Hook’s shoulders. Smee had brought all of his old clothes with them up here, of course, and he’d re-tailored a lot of it to match up with the new styles, although Hook had scowled when he’d first seen one of his blouses with almost all of the ruffles taken off. He looked well, though, always in his bright reds and deep blacks and purples and handsome blues of the jackets he liked best.

Smee had never gone in for that sort of thing. He liked his browns and pale blues, liked a clean white shirt – he’d look ridiculous if he dressed like Hook did, but somehow it suited him. Everything suited Hook.

They were opposites in many ways, Smee thought, Hook being tall and handsome and once strapping, now lithe, Smee being short and plain and fat.

Hook was keen as a sharp knife, where Smee was rather stupid, which had never bothered him; Hook was prone to fits of misery and was a pessimist by God’s design; Smee was ever cheerful and one of nature’s optimists; Hook was English – that is to say, he was closer to the Devil than to God – and Smee was Irish.

“What are you thinking about, Smee?” Hook asked. He was giving Smee a strange look.

“I was making some face, I suppose, Captain?”

“Some face is right, Smee,” said Hook.

“I was thinking about how you should shake Lucifer’s hand before you shook God’s, Captain,” Smee said in a conversational tone. “Being English, I mean.”

Hook’s strange look became even stranger, and he turned his head away from Smee as he sometimes did when he did not understand – or was choosing not to understand – whatever it was Smee had said, but he smiled. It was a small, wooden thing, a ghost of the devilish smirk Smee liked very much, but it was more than he had smiled in nearly two weeks, and was to be celebrated.

“You say very queer things at times, Smee,” said Hook.

“I keep queer company, Captain,” was Smee’s response, and when Hook laughed, it was quiet and prim, but it wasn’t appended with a fit of coughs, and Smee liked that very much.

With the height difference between them, it was once that Hook had a long, loping gait like some noble wolf or big cat, but his stride was shorter now, and he didn’t walk so quickly – it was easier for Smee to keep pace, and he no longer had to take four steps for every two of his captain’s, but he almost missed the bustle of working to keep up.

He thought perhaps that Hook was thinking of this, too, because once or twice, he glanced down at his own polished shoes and took a longer step, but he never kept this up for more than a few paces on the short walk into the village proper. By the time they began to walk past the first few houses, the little place that called itself a haberdasher’s but sold more nails than it did buttons and ribbon, the modest bookshop that had been ordering things in special for Smee and for Hook, and of course a few pubs, Hook was beginning to flag, and was forcing to stand up a little straighter, the rounded curve of his hook pressing against the centre of torso as though to remind his lungs to keep straight too.

“You needn’t come into the post office if you don’t like, Captain,” Smee said. “There’s the bookshop, or the grocer’s, or—”

“I’ll sit on the bench, Smee, you needn’t concern yourself with entertaining me,” Hook said dryly, and Smee frowned at him.

“We could go into the pub if you want a rest,” Smee suggested. “Before we go back, I mean.”

“Smee—” Hook said, a little out of breath, and Smee interrupted before he could go on, “They’ve alcoves and such, you know. We’d not be in full view of everyone.”

“You think I’m frightened of people laying eyes on me?” asked Hook, voice full of venom.

Smee knew a trap when it was set in front of him, and said nothing.

The captain was breathing shallowly through his mouth, and although Smee couldn’t yet hear the wheeze in his throat, he should rather head it off at the pass before he did – it would be best for Hook, he thought, if he sat down for an hour or so before he took another walk, even the short one back to the house, and he could see this understanding pass on the captain’s face, too.

Used to be that he liked an ale house or a tavern – not the noise, but the people, and the way they looked at him.

“The Egg and Swan,” Hook said mildly, with a crisp nod of his head.

He looked strange, without a hat, when they were out of doors like this. He had outright refused all of the modern hats that Smee had shown for him, and when Smee had suggested that perhaps he cut his hair to look a little more modern, he had thought Hook would actually kill him.

Smee had a hat.

He was wearing a panama, which he thought was quite handsome, and when he had marched into the living room wearing it for the first time, interrupting Hook where he was reading his book, Hook had looked up at him.

“I assume you love it, Captain,” said Smee upon this entry. “My hat, I mean.”

He had expected Hook to laugh – it had been late in the morning, and Hook had seemed wide awake and in unusual good humour, but he hadn’t. Looking up at Smee from his chair beside the fire, he had simply rested his hook against the base of his goateed chin, and said, “It suits you very well, Smee. One would think it made for you.”

Smee had come over all warm at that. He was warm thinking on it as he stood in line at the post office.

When he came back out, Hook was not sitting on the bench outside of the post office, and Smee felt his heart give an anxious twist in his rib cage, until he saw Hook’s red jacket across the way.

He was standing up straight, his hand and hook loosely folded in front of his belly, as he looked into the tobacconist’s window, and Smee hurried over to him, crossing the street to stand beside him.

The cigars in the window were displayed in rows in their piled up boxes, hay scattered loosely beneath them in the window as though they had only just been imported, and there were posters for different cigarettes and chewing tobaccos, too, all sorts.

Smee had brought a few cigars home a few months back, but Hook had gotten through half of one and then had slipped into one of the worst coughing fits Smee had heard from him, had been sick after.

“Could just get some light ones,” said Smee. “Nothing heavy. You miss it?”

“Of course,” said Hook in a low, distant voice. “But what I miss is the feeling it imparted – the satisfaction. There’s none of that, if I cough my heart into my hands halfway through.” His breathing had evened out, Smee was glad to hear, even though Hook was on his feet. He tired more quickly, standing, than once he did, but he was improving – and this, this was much improved. “Shall we to the pub?”

“Aye, yeah,” said Smee, and they went across the way.

It wasn’t busy in the pub, but it wasn’t quiet, neither – it was a few hours past noon, and there were a few people dotted around at the tables, men and women drinking or eating. People said hello to Smee, of course – Mrs Cratchett was sitting with her two sons at a table, and greeted him cheerfully, and there was Bob Head from one of the farms out east, and the Reverend Gansey, who was a tall man who was almost bald on top, and spoke with a lisp.

He and Smee, naturally, treated one another with a mutual distrust.

A few people looked their way, glanced particularly at the captain, which he ignored in that handsome, haughty way he had of ignoring people who were looking at him, admiring him. For all that Smee had been in the Egg and Swan a good few times, Hook walked up to the bar with his typical grace and confidence, and said cleanly, all clipped and polish, “Mrs Aspen, I presume?”

“Oh,” said Daisy Aspen, rushing up and giving him a bright grin – she was tall, almost as tall as Hook was himself, and she had an old burn on the side of her jaw from an accident with an iron when she was a little girl. She was a cheerful woman, bustling with big arms and wide thighs. “Captain Hook! It’s good to see you up and out.”

“Kind of you to say,” said Hook, and when Daisy put out her hand to shake over the bar, he didn’t even flinch, but his lips did twist into a small, amused smile, and he placed his hook against her palm.

“Oh,” she said, flushing pink. “Oh, of course, Captain, I, erm, I do—”

He laughed: it was a smooth, rich sound, and Smee could see the way that her flush deepened slightly, the way she glanced down at her shoes as she gave his hook a quick shape and stepped away.

“I’ll pull you two gents a pint,” she said. “We’ve a beef joint on, if you’d like to partake.”

“Please, Mrs Aspen, we would love to.”

“Oh, call me Daisy!” she said, and giggled like a woman much younger than her years. She seemed surprised by this herself, and put her hand over her mouth as she bustled quickly away.

“Times are, Captain Hook, I hate you,” said Smee.

“A married woman, Mr Smee,” was the softly-toned reply. “It’s not as if you would do anything I won’t.”

“I fuckin’ would,” muttered Smee, watching her arse as she walked away, and Hook elbowed him subtly in the shoulder.

For all his easy charm, he was looking slightly paler – it was very warm in the pub compared to outside, the air thick with pipe smoke, and Hook cleared his throat twice.

“Sit by the window, shall we?” asked Smee.

Hook inclined his head.

It was nice, Smee thought, that people came over and paid their dues, so to speak – Smee had told everyone they’d run a merchant ship, and of course everyone knew that Hook had been very ill, that he was recovering here, that Smee was—

Smee never called it looking after him, but other people did.

The Reverend introduced himself, and the Cratchetts, and Bob, and a few other people besides, and it was good that they were eating, Smee thought. Hook could talk without getting out of breath, but not for two hours in a smoky room, and this way he could focus on his meal and his drink and pretend he wasn’t out of breath to talk.

And Smee did most of the talking, anyway, for now.

It didn’t feel like normality. Not at all, it didn’t. But it did feel, in some way or other, as though they were closer to something—

Something better.

It was nice, to see the captain with other people again.

**Author's Note:**

> "But, Johannes, you said you weren't writing fanfic anymore!"
> 
> True! But Peter Pan is in the public domain, which means that much like my other books, I'll be posting this on Ao3, and will then publish it as an eBook once complete (as well as leaving it here on Ao3). Enjoy! Please remember to comment. :)
> 
> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://johannesevans.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johannesevans).


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